I think I know what the downgrade means: in effect, Wall Street is telling Obama (and by extension, the US government as a whole) who's boss. Obama appointed their men as his main economists (Summers, Geithner) and went along with the Wall Street program, especially that of its most powerful elements (Goldman, etc.), to accept the Tea Party's "no new taxes" program to cut domestic spending. But he's not totally their servant, since after all there are other political pressures and other campaign donors. So he needs to be brought to heel. Servants can never be too loyal, after all.
BTW, though the article by Felice Pace has a lot of good stuff in it, he puts too much emphasis on the ability of Global Capital to get its way in the US, realizing its collective interests. Not only is there resistance (though not much these days) but there are other fractions of capital, especially those that are tied down to the US market. In addition, the Global Capitalists are themselves split into fractions. Some of the pro-Global Capital program that Pace describes represents the interests of parts of this whole: for example, the effort to gut social security isn't really a "Global Capital" project, since the system is working well, with only minor adjustments needed. It instead represents those rich folks who think "I can afford to save for retirement, so everyone else should do it, too" plus the financial sectors that hope to profit by offering individual retirement accounts that replace social security. In the current era, the coalition that represents Global Capital is relatively coherent, able to push for attainment of its collective goals. The special-interest projects within the coalition do not go against the collective. But in other times, there are splits. I can imagine that a lot of the financiers might profit from a version of Dodd-Frank, for example. More specifically, there was a split in 2008 concerning the question of whether to let Lehman Brothers to fail or not. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
